Some people, in particular elderly, frail or physically impaired people, need to be kept active but experience difficulty during physical activity. During a physical activity like walking they are at risk of falling.
The ability to carry out the “usual” everyday tasks on their own does not only depend on the age of the person, but also on various disorders which may affect walking abilities to a certain degree. Such disorders may not only affect the walking ability and the ability to perform other motoric tasks, but may also affect the cognitive capability of such persons.
Especially people suffering from Parkinson's disease are concerned with the above-mentioned problems. The risk of falling is particularly high for patients suffering from Parkinson's diseases, as their motoric and cognitive skills decline with progression of the disease. A main cause of these fall events is that patients try to do two things at once, which overloads their cognitive and motoric ability to deal with the increased workload imposed upon them by the complexity of such so termed concurrent tasks.
There are various studies that clearly show the impaired walking ability in case of concurrent tasks for patients suffering from Parkinson's disease. Bond, J. M.: “Goal-Directed Secondary Motor Tasks: Their Effects on Gait in Subjects with Parkinson's disease”, in Arch Phys Med Rehabil Vol. 81, January 2000, pp. 110-116, for example, reports: “Difficulty performing two tasks at the same time is a frequent and debilitating problem in idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD). Most people can easily talk while they are walking, write down notes while they are having a conversation on the telephone, or listen to the radio while they are driving. In contrast, many people with PD find that when they focus attention on one task, the performance of another becomes troublesome. The second task becomes slow and difficult to sustain, and in some cases cannot be performed at all. Dual task interference in PD affects both movement and cognition and is accentuated when tasks are part of a long or complex sequence”. Bond, J. M. comes to the conclusion that “subjects with moderate disability in PD experience considerable difficulty when they are required to walk while attending to a complex visuomotor task involving the upper limbs”.
A similar study is known from Morris, M. et al.: “Postural instability in Parkinson's disease: a comparison with and without a concurrent task” in Elsevier, Gait and Posture 12 (2000), pp. 205-216. This paper also shows in several tests that the risk of persons suffering from Parkinson's disease to unintentionally fall down while walking significantly increases if these persons perform additional concurrent cognitive and/or motoric tasks while walking and thereby get distracted.
Such persons should thus be advised to avoid doing such combined actions that combine either two motoric or a motoric and a cognitive task and then lead to an excessive demand of their cognitive and motoric skills.
US 2014/0276130 discloses methods and/or systems for diagnosing, monitoring and/or treating persons at risk for falling and/or pathological conditions.